The town can be anyone’s. What puts a map in a year is how it was printed — engraved in one colour, lithographed in two, offset in the yellow-road palette, or drawn by a computer — what the streets are called and in which register, whether the scale bar says miles or kilometres, and, on a transit map, whether the lines follow the streets or run at forty-five degrees. This is the research behind the Map Room. Every entry below is workshop practice unless a source is named.
Before 1900 a town plan is engraved and printed in one colour, hatched where the town is built, with serif lettering and a ruled frame; from the 1900s the lithographed plan adds one tint (a red for the main roads, a blue for the water); after the war the offset street map settles into the yellow main road, blue water, green park palette that every European publisher used into the 1980s; the 1980s and 1990s brighten the inks and set bolder sans lettering; from about 2000 the map looks like a screen — flat, ruleless, in a humanist sans. The Map Room picks the look from the year and lets you override it, and Checks says when a look is out of its years.
Henry Beck’s diagram of the London Underground, issued in January 1933, is where straight lines, forty-five-degree angles and evenly spaced stations begin. Before it, a transit map is a geographic map with the lines drawn over the streets; after it the schematic spreads — slowly, through the later 1930s and after the war — to the other systems. The studio draws the lines on the streets before 1933 and schematically from it, and warns when a continental system is schematic before 1940. (Source: the published histories of the London Underground map; the date is well attested.)
| Country | The scale bar |
|---|---|
| United Kingdom | Miles until the metrication of the late 1960s; both measures through the 1970s; kilometres on commercial maps from about 1980, with miles persisting on road signage to this day. |
| United States | Miles, always. |
| Canada, Australia | Miles until the early 1970s, kilometres after. |
| India | Miles under the Raj and into the 1950s; kilometres from the metric changeover of 1957–62. |
| The Continent, Turkey, Russia | Kilometres throughout the studio’s years. |
Britain classifies its roads as A and B in 1919–21; before that a road map names roads for where they go. The American numbered highways are adopted in November 1926; France’s N and D numbering settles in 1930; Germany’s Reichsstraßen are numbered in 1932 and become Bundesstraßen in 1949; Italy’s strade statali are numbered from 1928. The regional road map carries the country’s shields only from those years.
The studio invents its streets in the language of the country, with the generic where the language puts it — High Street, rue de la Gare, Bahnhofstraße, Via Roma, Calle Mayor, Οδός Αθηνών, Rua da Estação, Stationsstraat, İstasyon Caddesi, Вокзальная улица. In Greece the names are set in the old register before 1976 (Οδὸς, with the polytonic accent); Turkish in the Latin alphabet exists only from November 1928, so the studio refuses earlier Turkish sheets; pre-1918 Russian carries the hard sign. Districts are set wide and faint, as the engraver did.
The pocket street atlas with grid letters, an index and continued on page cross-references dates from the London A–Z of 1936; the studio warns before that year. A page is one leaf of a stapled booklet on thin paper, with the running head and the page number in a solid bar.
The folded town map for visitors is a product of the railway excursion trade from the 1880s: a plan with numbered points of interest, a key, and the advertisement of whoever paid for the printing — the station hotel, the brewery, the firm from the Brand Room. It folds twice to DL to go in a pocket.
Every town, street, river, district, line and publisher on a sheet is invented from the seed; the production’s own places (its station, its hospital, its café) are placed where the script says they are. No real town plan, atlas page, transit diagram or publisher’s device is reproduced. The dates on this page are the real history the sheets are drawn against.
The year the yellow-road palette became general on the Continent (the studio uses 1945, which is a judgement, not a citation); the first schematic diagram outside London; the exact years commercial British maps dropped the mile. These are open questions in the Archive.
Every date on this page is built into the studio: pick a country and a year and the sheet takes the look, the measure and the lettering of that year — and the Checks panel says what an audience could catch.
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